Lock and Key

I overslept. The temperature dropped down to where I could actually sleep under the sheets, go into deep, deep dreaming, and be awaked from heavy REM just a bit too early. I felt fatigued all day.

More cleaning. Finished the depot and turned to the upstairs, rooftop cabin rooms.

Father Alan made a tuna casserole for dinner. It seems like we are eating so much food. I have eaten more here than I do at home. It is always a true irony that I come to Haiti to gain weight. I tried to limit my portions today, but it was difficult. For lunch we had plantain fried in eggs, flour, cinnamon, and honey, then smothered them with peanut butter and more honey, sided by fresh mango; now this heaping platter of tuna. This struggle that I have been trying to understand the last several days—this appears to be a corollary, if not the same issue: eating too much versus the fact that we cannot save the food in the fridge because we have no electricity; trying to eat light though Father Alan is not shy about eating or drinking anything in any portion (we have, after all, worked very hard for this mini-feast); enjoying abundance versus considering the starvation outside; dumping things that need to be thrown out because they are no longer useful. I simply feel like we are not being mindful of our consumption.

Now, I can turn anything into a problem and then run myself in circles around it. I hope my friends and family find it endearing, but I know it drives them crazy. I once read an article that accused the so called “mystics” of trying to twist any experience into a metaphor. If that is what is meant by “mystic,” then I would gladly try it on, though there is nothing mystical about anything I do, at least not when I make an issue of everything without really getting to the metaphor part. But some tests are too difficult to ignore.

After dinner Father Alan and I went for our normal perambulation, as he calls it. We had made it 50 yards from our house when a white truck pulled up, honking. Inside was my dear friend, Pere (Father) Jean-Louis Malherbe, who hosts me at his parish in Fon Pye (Fond Pierre). All of my trips have been to his church and school in the country, so it is exciting to see the school that St. Patrick’s (Lexington) is trying to help fund be built step by step, even if through pictures only. The last time I saw one, the school was simply a foundation. In two months he has gotten most of the walls up as well. We quickly returned to the house to visit with him. Major trouble.

When we leave the house we are required to close and bolt the back kitchen door as well as padlock the front door (at night we have two padlocks). The security guards watch the house and the gate for us, but even for a short stroll we cannot be too careful. There is always that one time. This, fortunately, was not one of them. However, when I pulled the keys off the hook, I pulled the ones that I had been carrying around all day: the upstairs room keys. Basically, I was not being mindful. So, when we returned, we were confronted with the barred windows, the bolted back door, and the padlocked front gate. I encouraged the two priests to go to the accessible roof and visit as I tried to figure out what to do. The security guard, “Doo Doo”, went to find Domond, who returned a few minutes later shaking his head. “What lock did you use, the big one or the little one?”“Uh. The big one.” (Pause)
"I do not think that I have a key to that one."

Basically, between "Doo Doo" laughing and me nervously laughing and Domond nervously laughing but with absolutely no way inside the house, we were in a big pile of "merde". The entire house has bars around it—every window, air conditioner, door. It is virtually impregnable.

I went to report our dilemma to the two fathers, but I was most shaken by how confused I was by the situation. It was an honest mistake. Unmindful, but honest. I kept thinking, "Why did this happen this way?" I was torn between crying at stupidity, which may or may not be have to blame, and utter calmness of simply knowing that is the way things are sometimes--the up-and-down wave I wrote of yesterday. I was not sure whether or not to be embarrassed, and if not, was that being prideful and unyielding to a growth experience? The circular thinking began to press in for a moment.

I just knew this was a spiritual test--this was the framework upon which all of my bizarre and teetering emotions were placed. Now, I am no more important than anyone else--we all are taken through different tests, though often we do not realize it until later, or we miss them completely. But I knew. Father Alan was antsy, Domond was angry--"Doo Doo" had told me as much when I made the mistake of asking, though we both laughed--and I was balanced in a weird place of absolute stasis.

What was it all about? If anything?

My mind worked: I had screwed up, but it was, as I said earlier, honest. Thinking in circles, beating myself up for little things, which become big things because of circular thinking, being ashamed of having done something foolish, worrying about overeating--all of these came to afore. I was overburdening myself in perfectionism.

You can accuse me of reading into it all a little too much. Perhaps. Or, perhaps, as the failed bolt cutters lay on the ground, “Doo Doo’s” muscles bulging as he swung clawhammer to padlock, I simply gave up working too hard. Not in any final way, or in any moment of enlightenment, but because I was exhausted for a moment. I couldn’t be perfect at all in this situation, not even perfectly embarrassed, because I obviously didn’t intend it to happen. It should have been a big deal, but I also felt like it wasn’t. All emotions became equal.

As master Deng Ming-Dao said in the reading I had last night, “All experiences are valid, because all experiences are of Tao.” One could read “Tao” as “God”, though it is helpful to also read it with the translation of “The Way” because, as I like to point out again and again, we are always in the way of ourselves. This is a fascinating thing to realize because it means we are always “in the way,” we are always “with God.” The key words here remain, “we are”. I myself am so busy working at living that I forget that I am doing just that—living. And knowing this should free me at some point—but not by thinking or writing about, but by, as the Taoist masters teach, experiencing it. Being-with-it.

One day, with enough learning, forgetting, experiencing, learning again, in some mystical process—the truest mystical process of being—we become ourselves and we live. It is like constantly oversleeping and then realizing that we are suddenly awake; weary or not, we are awake. And we have always been awake—never asleep at all. Suddenly the hammer strikes hard enough, the lock falls away, the door can be opened up, and we can walk into the place in which we already are: ourselves, free.

This was a waking experiencing experience, not because it was filled with gravitas, or emotion, or because it was some huge revelation, but more so because it wasn’t. It was simply life in all of its humor and absurdity unfolding in a moment, a moment which normally would have either passed by without notice or been entangled in thought; it was neither of those things and also both. It was a situation to eat up.

Or perhaps it was just something stupid I did. You can choose.